Voice, Multisensory Perception, and Metaphor

In this chapter, I examine the metaphorical conceptualisation of touchable language in the works of Herta Müller. To that end, I focus on and analyse how she uses tactile metaphors for voice. I use the concept of voice as a metonymic vehicle for language and regard tactile experience as an aspect of multisensory perception. I consider the process of multisensory perception to argue that tactile metaphors can activate multiple senses. This chapter will challenge my initial assumption that voice literally stands for a purely acoustic phenomenon and will show that it is conceptualised ad hoc and does not exist in isolation from other sensory experiences and, more generally, from various contexts. This is in accord with the view of Daniel Casasanto and Gary Lupyan that all concepts depend on contextualisation.¹ Kohl has likewise emphasised the role of context in metaphorical conceptualisation.² Antonio Damasio asserts that perception, ‘in whatever sensory modality, is the result of the brain’s cartographic skill’.³ What follows is that the mind can create perceptual images.⁴ Even as a perceptual image, voice is not just sound and can be understood only in the relevant linguistic, bodily, and cultural contexts.⁵ At the very least, it is associated with those sensory

impressions perceived simultaneously with sound.

It is not entirely clear why different modes of sensory experience are evoked to reason about auditory perception. Multisensory metaphor may be a suitable term for this situation,

1 Daniel Casasanto and Gary Lupyan, ‘All Concepts are Ad Hoc Concepts’, in The Conceptual Mind:

New Directions in the Study of Concepts, ed. by Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015), pp. 543–66 (p. 543).

2 Katrin Kohl, Metapher (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007), p. 52.

3 Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (London: William Heinemann, 2010), p. 70.

4 For a discussion of the non-pictorial mental imagery, see Emily Troscianko, ‘Reading Imaginatively:

The Imagination in Cognitive Science and Cognitive Literary Studies’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 42 (2013), 181–98 (pp. 184–86).

5 This role of context is well established for the perception of music. For this reason, Jonathan Friedman argues that music is not just sound: Music in Our Lives: Why We Listen, How It Works (Jefferson: McFarland, 2015), pp. 96–97.

but it does not explain why exactly this happens. Ning Yu refers to this trope as ‘synesthetic metaphor, i.e., metaphor that maps across various sensory domains’.⁶ Synaesthesia, however, is a distinct and rare cognitive phenomenon that does not correlate with the conventionality and ubiquity of metaphors that map across different senses. Hence I prefer the term

multisensory metaphor. In contrast to synaesthesia, multisensory perception is common and may help understand the motivation for such metaphors: the nature of human perception can provide a causal explanation for multisensory metaphor. Human perception routinely involves more than one sense. In the course of human interaction with the environment, the sense of hearing works in synchrony with other senses. When two sensory experiences co-occur, they can be bound together to form a multisensory image and can hence be associated with each other as parts of the same conceptual frame. Humans have evolved to perceive and explore the environment through multiple sensory channels; therefore, different sensory perceptions can correlate and later be used to explain auditory experience metaphorically.

Thinking about voice, people engage different senses due to the multisensory nature of perception.⁷ Sounds constantly occur along with other sensory stimuli. Human senses work together as ‘observers integrate signals from multiple sensory modalities into percepts’.⁸ The construal of multisensory images (percepts) enables people to succeed in their interaction with the world because it allows them to identify and deal with those things that can harm or benefit them. Vanessa Harrar et al. remark that ‘[i]ntegrating information from individual senses increases the chance of survival by reducing the variability in the incoming signals, thus allowing us to respond more rapidly. […] This response facilitation is […] attributed to multisensory integration.’⁹ A falling mortar shell, a jumping tiger, or a skidding car are not just auditory or visual images, they are more than that in terms of sensory perception and are conceived of as potential life threats.

6 Ning Yu, ‘Synesthetic Metaphor: A Cognitive Perspective’, Journal of Literary Semantics, 32 (2003), 19–34 (p. 20).

7 Raymond W. Gibbs, Embodiment and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 229–31.

8 Ophelia Deroy, Charles Spence, and Uta Noppeney, ‘Metacognition in Multisensory Perception’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 736–47 (p. 744).

9 Vanessa Harrar, Laurence R. Harris, and Charles Spence, ‘Multisensory Integration Is Independent of Perceived Simultaneity’, Experimental Brain Research, 235 (2017), 763–75 (p. 763).

The relationship between perception and conception is well established in the framework of cognitive psychology. Lawrence Barsalou, the author of the perceptual theory of knowledge, argues that ‘cognition is inherently perceptual, sharing systems with perception at both the cognitive and the neural levels.’¹⁰ Gallese and Lakoff posit that ‘rational thought is an exploitation of the normal operations of our bodies’ and that ‘language makes direct use of the same brain structures used in perception and action’.¹¹ These tenets of cognitive

psychology are fundamental to my analysis of figurative language. In this chapter, I will show how a writer can use tactile experience to present metaphorically the complex image of voice, and thereby my study will support the embodied view of meaning and cognition.

Multisensory perception makes metaphor a natural way of thinking about things, but also makes it difficult to break down metaphors into their constituent parts. Metaphors

provide us with an opportunity to reason about relatively abstract things with the help of more concrete concepts. Sensorimotor experiences can be the prime example of such concrete phenomena. Indifference or hostility are complex social concepts that can be conveyed through the experience of cold. If someone’s voice is said to be cold, people associate this sensory image with the emotional state of the speaker. The experience of cold is tangible and vividly communicates the message. In a similar vein, the acoustic properties of voice can be associated with other sensory experiences. A sharp voice can refer to both vision and touch.

Multisensory perception leads to situations when there is nothing that could explicitly tell us which sensory experience to prioritise or how to isolate it from other stimuli. Importantly, multisensory perception could be the causal mechanism behind the formation of primary metaphors. The concept of primary metaphor was developed by Joseph E. Grady in his doctoral thesis ‘Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes’ (1997) and involves two minimal concepts that are associated with each other by way of co-occurrence:

‘Each primary metaphor has a minimal structure and arises naturally, automatically, and unconsciously through everyday experience by means of conflation, during which cross-domain associations are formed’ (PF, p. 46). Multisensory perception and neural binding could explain how these associations are established.¹² Since sensory experiences are routinely bound together and possibly integrated into multisensory images, perception can

10 Barsalou, p. 577.

11 Gallese and Lakoff, p. 473.

12 For a neural theory of language, see Jerome A. Feldman, From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006).

organise conceptual frames and hence lay the foundation for cross-domain associations. The multisensory nature of metaphors should not be confused with multimodal metaphors, defined by Charles Forceville as ‘metaphors in which target, source, and/or mappable features are represented or suggested by at least two different sign systems (one of which may be language) or modes of perception.’¹³ In this dissertation, the term multisensory refers to the sensory modalities evoked by metaphors and not to the sign system or medium of metaphor representation. After all, I focus exclusively on verbal metaphors and their conceptualisation.

While multisensory perception could well be the cause of the formation of metaphors, it is also the confounding factor in readers’ efforts to analyse metaphors and categorise their experiences into sensory modalities.

It is important to bear in mind that all the terms in this dissertation are conceptual affordances (potentially useful resources) in the intellectual landscape of the field of literary analysis and cannot accurately represent the cognitive processes in the mind due to the complex nature of these processes. Advances in neuroscience might make redundant and obsolete such terms as image, metaphor, mental representation, frame, and even concept. I agree with Casasanto and Lupyan that ‘the word concept is […] problematic (though hard to avoid) insomuch as naming something with a noun seems to imply it is an object, but conceptualizing is a process.’¹⁴ Nevertheless, it is reasonable to use these terms while discussing literary texts since they are instrumental in analysing the human-scale concerns of literature and psychology. Mental representations are a useful heuristic in the context of metaphor research. I rely on such categories as concept and frame, even though I have found that voice does not exist as a well-defined concept or frame in Müller’s texts. Voice relates to various experiences and acquires different associations depending on the relevant bodily, linguistic, and cultural contexts. The ad hoc nature of conceptualisation (as propounded by Casasanto and Lupyan), the possible influence of non-representational embodied cognition,¹⁵ and the constitutive role of multisensory perception problematise the process of metaphor building and make it difficult to identify its key aspects across different contexts and sensory

13 Charles Forceville, ‘Metaphor in Pictures and Multimodal Representations’, in The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, pp. 462–82 (p. 463).

14 Casasanto and Lupyan, p. 546.

15 This view of cognition is defended by Robert Epstein, ‘The Empty Brain’, The Aeon, 18 May 2016

<https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer> [accessed 19 April 2017].

modalities. To analyse metaphor, I must distinguish between its target and source domains, but the complex nature of perception and conception impedes such analysis and instead reveals that voice is imagined and understood contextually and in close relationship with various sensory experiences.

Analysing the voice metaphors in the fiction and non-fiction works of Herta Müller, I found that there is no overarching stable concept of voice in her texts; it is a mosaic of different meanings, not a single coherent frame. Müller decides how to present voice depending on the context. I agree with Zoltán Kövecses, who posits that ‘variation in metaphorical conceptualisation is a result of the various types of contexts’.¹⁶ While such views on the role of context and use in language and meaning, and on the fuzziness of conceptualisation resonate with and build on Wittgenstein’s original ideas in the

Philosophical Investigations (1953),¹⁷ cognitive linguistics also emphasises the motivated nature of language and its embodiment: ‘It is a fundamental hypothesis of cognitive linguistics that meaning involves motivated mappings from conceptualisation to

expression.’¹⁸ Consequently, voice is not an arbitrary collection of ideas and associations.

Cognitive psychology demonstrates that meaning is motivated by the body, social interaction, and the environment.¹⁹ Metaphorically speaking, Wittgenstein argued that language allows people to quench their thirst (achieve their goals),²⁰ whereas contemporary cognitive

linguistics and psychology show that it also tastes good (is motivated by embodiment). Since metaphor establishes mappings between different domains of experience and commonly relies on sensorimotor images, it is a natural way of thinking, speaking, and writing about voice.

Conceptual metaphor theory postulates that metaphors fundamentally rely on sensorimotor experiences. And indeed, Müller consistently evokes such experiences for the metaphorical presentation of voice. Therefore, this chapter focuses on the metaphorical conceptualisation of voice through the source domain of tactile experience and shows how

16 Zoltán Kövecses, Where Metaphors Come From: Reconsidering Context in Metaphor (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 156.

17 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, pp. 27^e–39^e (sections 66–100).

18 Chris Sinha, ‘Grounding, Mapping, and Acts of Meaning’, in Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations, Scope, and Methodology, ed. by Theo Janssen and Gisela Redeker (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999), pp. 223–55 (p. 229).

19 Casasanto, p. 715.

20 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, pp. 2^e–6^e (sections 1–12).

these metaphors rely on and challenge conceptual and linguistic conventions. It demonstrates how a literary author uses more concrete concepts to reason about voice and to communicate effectively her vision of it to her readers.